Long-haired lover from Liverpool David Valjalo speaks to ex-Relic art honcho and founder, Rob Cunningham, about his new project: a planet-spanning free-to-play RTS called Hardware. Oh, and he also discusses how he’s building giant, working robots in his spare time.

I couldn’t resist getting Homeworld in that headline. As you’ll discover below, the classic space strategy game is something of a sensitive topic for Rob Cunningham. As much out of respect for the trials and tribulations of current rights-holder THQ as his intention to mark his own studio’s first big project as a fresh, original RTS on its own merit. But when he says that Blackbird Interactive’s bold step into the genre is being worked on not only by him, but a couple of other fellow ex-Relic folk and Homeworld composer Paul Ruskay, you can’t help the feeling that an old, faithful dream team is reassembling to boldly go once again and reinvigorate, maybe even reinvent, real-time strategy in the stars…

RPS: So, what’s your story been since Homeworld?

Rob Cunningham: We shipped Homeworld in 1999. Relic was still young in those days, so being one of the founders I carried on at the studio as we got more work. My personal story was as art director on Homeworld. We sold Relic in 2004 and continued under the THQ banner for a couple of years. I did Homeworld 2, Company Of Heroes, Dawn Of War. I left in 2007.

RPS: What was so special about 2007?

Rob Cunningham: Around then I started seeing what was happening in the industry and in the marketplace. The rise of online gaming, the rise of free to play. I saw there was an opportunity there. Also, I wanted to do some more innovation in RTS. At the time in 1997 I was sort of ahead of the curve. THQ’s appetite for expanding the RTS genre was pretty limited so I thought ‘this has got to be done, let’s start doing it.’ Pretty much then, though, I took a year off from the game industry, did a few other things. The main thing was the eatART foundation – energy awareness through art. It was a complete departure from gaming, an art research lab that’s still going strong now. The idea is to build crazy, kinetic, giant robots. We opened an industrial space here in Vancouver, packed it with welding equipment and got to work building crazy machines. There was the Mondo spider, Daisy the solar powered vehicle, a giant robot snake and there’ll be a four-legged walking mech coming next. I personally funded it for a few years, we bring them out for big shows and they pay us to deploy the creatures. Massive, multi-tonne robot creatures we’re building for fun. And it’s happening in the same building as Blackbird Interactive.

RPS: What was the aim and ambition of starting up Blackbird Interactive, having taken a break from games to… build robots?

Rob Cunningham: Blackbird itself – we started up around the end of 2010, we were brainstorming the idea behind the kind of game we wanted to make, watching the market, and we started work on the [current] game which has a working-title of Hardware. We grew the company in 2011 and then here we are, in the present day, with a prototype in development and going into closed beta [in March].

RPS: Who founded Blackbird with you?

Rob Cunningham: There was Aaron Kambeitz who was lead artist on Homeworld and an artist on Homeworld 2, there was head tech lead at EA, Yossarian King, and Cody Kenworthy who was also at Relic from around 2005. We’ve now got 32 full-time staff working on the game with another six part-time.

RPS: With so many ex-Relic staff involved, is there a lot of Homeworld’s DNA in Hardware?

Rob Cunningham: Well they’re both science fiction RTS games but the answer to how much of Homeworld is in Hardware is… not that much. In terms of DNA, in the same way parents’ DNA is in their children, you can say Homeworld shares DNA with Hardware in as much as it has similar parents. But that’s where the similarities end. There is an art style that connects them, but the gameplay is very different, the experience is very different, but what will be the same is that sense of epic, immersive story. That connection with what’s happening in the game world. We’ll have Paul Ruskay doing audio and music so we’ll have that DNA in there as well, so from a creative point of view, a vibe, there are quite a lot of similarities, but in terms of the game itself, it’s quite a departure from Homeworld.

RPS: What’s the aim and ambition of the game? What else can you reveal?

Rob Cunningham: The intent was to explore what sort of new evolution we could do with RTS. What can I tell you about the game? It’s all about massive trucks rolling around in a huge desert. A sort of Tonka truck experience. As with Homeworld, scale is a big deal for us with this game. The vehicles are huge and just get huge-er. It’s got that Russian Doll sort of quality, of vehicles going into bigger vehicles and bigger vehicles going inside of even bigger vehicles [laughs]. One of the things we’ll be exploring is epic scope with a vast game-board. We’ll be doing a planet-scale RTS but deploying it incrementally over time. The first betas will be reasonably small and feel like a traditional RTS: limited map, limited canvas. But as we go forwards into 2013 we’ll be deploying ever more, ever bigger maps until ultimately the full vision of the game is a planet-scale map that you spent hours travelling across, a fully concurrent experience.

RPS: It sounds like there may be a free to play element there?

Rob Cunningham: Yeah it’s going to be free to play and there’s going to be multiplayer in there.

RPS: So free to play is one of the things you think will drive the genre forward?

Rob Cunningham: Yeah, there are many things you can do with RTS – the marketplace is huge – but our personal vision is a big map… you could say in a nutshell the vision is Google Earth meets RTS. We want to develop an RTS game paradigm where there’s a very impactive, compelling combat and exploration game on a minute-to-minute basis but there’s also this other layer, a macro game, which takes place over days, weeks, months and it’s all about territorial ownership of a much bigger map.

RPS: So would you say the RTS has stagnated?

Rob Cunningham: There’s lots of innovation happening with it. Look at Kickstarter, things like Planetary Annihilation, I think that’s a lot of fun. Stagnation is a strong word but it hasn’t moved forward as quickly as I would have hoped. There’s a lot of room for growth in the genre, especially in terms of getting it out to a wider audience. It’s not stagnated as much as it’s focussed very much on a relatively small group of hardcore RTS players. There’s an opportunity to bring the RTS paradigm to a much wider audience.

RPS: Would you say “casual” is the next big audience, then?

Rob Cunningham: Yeah, so mid-core users, if we can capture some casual users that’s great too. What we want to avoid is that click-fest barrier to entry that a lot of RTS games are known for.

RPS: Do you still think the PC is the home of the RTS?

Rob Cunningham: Yeah I think the PC has got long legs. There’s plenty more we’ll see with PC. But one of the things we want to explore with our game is a platform agnostic approach where you can access the game across multiple devices and still have a coherent experience with one single player account. We want to break the walls down a bit and reach out to other devices beyond PC, too. It remains to be seen how, in detail, that’ll rollout. I’d categorise it as a web delivery platform.

RPS: You mentioned a “Tonka truck” element to Hardware – is it safe to say there’s been an influence from the eatART robot-building going on alongside development of the game?

Rob Cunningham: Only in a very cursory way. EatART and Blackbird are definitely different beasts. There are similarities in that both organisations are packed with guys that love… guy’s stuff. One of the cool things about the organisations sharing the same space is that one is digital and the other very much real. Some of the guys at Blackbird collaborate to build these mechanical beasts. There’s an oil and grease quality at eatART which, when you’re at a desk with nothing but digital content, it’s nice to get your hands on some real-world material. And the same vice-versa, the robot guys are very curious [about what we’re doing] and giving us creative ideas for the Hardware project.

RPS: So, have to ask, could we ever see a Homeworld 3? What’s the rights situation there?

Rob Cunningham: Well the Homeworld property is owned by THQ. Anything can happen with the future of THQ, as you know, they have their own troubles. There’s an auction taking place later this month for all of their assets, so who knows what could happen. It remains to be seen if they’re going to continue holding it. Any discussion about Homeworld 3 I have no position on, it’s completely THQ’s deal.

RPS: Will you have your eyes on the auction at the end of the month, for those rights?

Rob Cunningham: The correct answer there would be no comment. And basically no. I know there’s a huge Homeworld fanbase out there and people get very excited when we start talking about Homeworld. We definitely want to connect with those guys, but we’re very cautious about actually associating ourselves with the franchise as we don’t own it. We don’t want to complicate matters [for THQ] or upset those guys, they’ve got enough on their plate. We’re coming out with a completely different project. If you like Homeworld, you’ll probably like [Hardware], but this is not a Homeworld game and has nothing to do with Homeworld.

Activision/Blizzard ? This explains it then.
This wiki entry confirms the confusion between the 2 companies -> link to homeworld.wikia.com
In 3 seconds I have found a torrent with Homeworld 1&2. If it is impossible to buy a game, it is just promotion for illegal downloads..

Buying second hand from Amazon is just the same as pirating it as far as the developers bottom line is concerned.

If you check the Amazon link you’ll find that the order is filled out by a company called BLS mart. A company that flogs discontinued goods from warehouse clearances. I’d be amazed if a single penny you spent found it’s way to someone who actually worked on the game.

He didn’t say anything about second hand, he said “fresh” which implies to me that it’s a new copy, either way there are new, sealed copies available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk and surely the dev got their cut when the publisher sold those copies to their distributors back in 1999 (or whenever)?

If you don’t have a DVD-drive then naturally a disc won’t do you much good. I commented mostly on the absurdity of excusing piracy with it being ‘impossible’ to get a copy of the game. I am not so sure, however, that not having a DVD-drive is a valid excuse to pirate(which you may not have meant to say). It would most definitely be ideal if they were more readily available. But, they’re not. But they are also not impossible to get. If they were available on Steam I’d be the first to get them!

The copies I bought were sealed. I can’t comment on if what Bhazor says is true or not. My hope is that some penny went to the developers.

I do not know if it works on Windows 7 or 8. I have, however, got them both running on Vista!

Availability and convenience are 2 very important factors. Homeworld 1 & 2 are two very specific cases that don’t have a lot to do with the pc game market on a whole, I am not talking about illegal downloads in general.
Here illegal torrenting is extremely convenient whereas I have only found the game after extensive search, and only second hand physical copies.

Buying second hand from Amazon is just the same as pirating it as far as the developers bottom line is concerned.

Buying it from DD services means exactly the same the vast majority of the time (few developers see money from actual sales). In a case like Homeworld, where the rights were bought off from yet another company, no one even remotely involved with the making of the game gets paid from your buying. In most extreme cases, non one in the gaming industry, save the DD service, gets paid from it.

Also, one key difference, with second-hand sales the publisher was paid the first time the game was bought. There’s nothing wrong or shameful in the fact that re-selling of the copy won’t make them any money.

I haven’t had a working DVD drive for years now. It shouldn’t be necessary in this age at all.

Any money you spend on the game is going to go to Amazon, the retailer going through Amazon, and unlikely but possibly Sierra (IE Activision).

If what you want is to support the original guys behind the game, buy Company of Heroes, Dawn of War (whichever) or Space Marine and support Hardware when it comes out. That’s the best way to show your support.

“Yeah it’s going to be free to play ….”
“Yeah, so mid-core users, if we can capture some casual users that’s great too. What we want to avoid is that click-fest barrier to entry that a lot of RTS games are known for.”

These two comments helped me contain excitement. Currently not interested.

well, Homeworld wasn that “micro” anyway, to be honest. the units did their thing anyway, you just had to tell them where to go and when to attack. the actual targeting was mostly up to them anyway. (except for maybe capital ships)

He is saying: “You’re saying you wouldn’t want a game targeted for “mid-core” audiences! Well I say to you sir: Doth thee not remember Homeworld one and the sequel? Those games were splendid even without clicking alot!”

I don’t want a game TARGETING mid to casual gamers because that is almost always made in a format that I don’t enjoy.

Homeworld wasn’t made to appeal to casual audiences. It had a fair amount of depth hidden behind those simplistic mechanics.

Having said that, I never really got into Homeworld. There were more games around that catered to me so I only breifly played it and moved on. Were Homeworld to come out now, I would lap it up however.

Yes, but that doesn’t come from ff2P being an overall decent proposition – though I do believe it can work in some few specialized designs – so much as the classic pay to play model being devalued and crippled by what is being done to it.

I try to do not hate it as well. I mostly see it on mobile (where it is omnipresent) and it kills the interest of many games, either by creating grinding walls that can only be defeated by in-app-payments or massive grinding or by trying to lure the player into IAP via dirty tricks.
It works for a couple of titles though, too bad they are very rare.

Well its yet to seen if this implies simplicity and lack of depth. One of the big things going on over at Uber with Planetary Annihilation is the idea of streamlining the UI so that management of the massive number of units is simple and straightforward and flows nicely so that you can get on with the actual conduct of planning and managing the game rather than being overwhelmed with micro.

The thing about micro is that it takes an obscene APM to compete with good players. It creates a physical muscle memory requirement to even feel in command of a game on a scale that Planetary Annihilatin and I presume Hardware will laugh at.

I think we get a bit gunshy on the idea of making something “accessible” because its usually just a buzzword for gutting the core of the game to make it easy for players with no creative ambition to get into it. That said, we don’t have anything on it. I think maybe we get too cynical about casual and “mid-core” players. I think MAYBE if someone who knows what they’re doing does it right it won’t be a nightmare… maybe.

But… I’m being devil’s advocate. We have no proof except his words on what they want to do and so far we can infer through our own prejudices what this’ll mean. My own feeling on Free to Play is that it inherently guts the value of a game, and even turns them into crap when they were good inthe first place (see Team Fortress 2). Thats my feeling, but we’re still early in the Free to Play paradigm. Someone could still make it work well, just the same as someone could easily ruin Kickstarter forever by embezzling and killing all confidence in it.

Opinions on the nature of the concepts behind projects are subjective when those concepts themselves are basically neutral.

I’m basically parsing a lot here, but at the end of the day… I wanna see more concept art cause its gorgeous. I am however… well I’m putting this on a lower priority for my watch list. It isn’t trying to sell me on its revolutionary ideas as much as it sounds like someone trying to say they’re dong something new and cool without actually saying anything bad about anybody… which kinda smells corporate. But apparently he’s a founder and a manager so they tend to speak this way… except Mavor, he’s kind of my current hero.

As much as I hate to reply to such a long post with two small thoughts, this is it:

Why do you think making TF2 F2P hurt the game? It was still the same game but with a different business model. Literally nothing changed in the core game.

League of Legends. LoL is accessible, fun and super challenging. It requires you to learn without hammering you over the head with a mountain of a learning curve. It allows the best players to show off their skill and make plays happen from nothing. And it’s free to play. And has been from the beginning. Disregard runes and paying for champions, only tell me if the core game could be made better if they didn’t have a free to play model.

TF2’s core design has been terribly diluted by the addition of zillions of items. The game we bought in the orange box doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t want to play the TF2 they’re offering now. Sometimes more is not better.

That happened well before TF2 went F2P, though. Maybe the rate of new items went up after it went F2P (I honestly don’t know, haven’t been following TF2 in forever), but there were already a large number of items in the P2P era, probably 10 or so big patches’ worth.

Compared to most other games, LoL’s learning curve is quite steep and it (and its community) is very unforgiving to someone trying to learn the game. That’s likely endemic to the entire MOBA/DotA-like genre, however.

That said, F2P is fine if done correctly. LoL’s F2P implementation is a great example of F2P done right – I would also argue that PlanetSide 2 does a pretty good job with its F2P (without paying anything, the cert grind is pretty much in line with the gear grind in other MMOs).

I think LoL is hamstrung by its insistence on hiding champions behind a pay wall. I know LoL players contend that they “enjoy” working to unlock champions, but I wonder if they’d be saying the same thing if they were given a taste of unrestricted champion access.

Thing is, limiting players to champs they’ve unlocked damages the potential strategic depth during team picking. It also means a player could find themselves without a champion they want to play in the role their team needs, which isn’t fun no matter how you spin it. E.g. my team would often need a solo bruiser or support, but since I never focused on those roles I just didn’t have a champion I enjoyed unlocked.

This is exacerbated by the fact that newer (more expensive) champions are often more flashy, sophisticated, and exciting. The design philosophy has evolved a lot over time, and the older (cheaper) champions feel pretty dated. And when I played, it seemed like the free rotation was always about 80% older champions, meaning you wouldn’t find many exciting options there.

The fact that runes and champions are unlocked with the same resource also creates some seriously conflicting motivations within the long-term persistent metagame. The best plan when I played was to unlock *nothing at all* until you hit level 30, which was the worst of all worlds.

League of Legends has, by far, one of the *worst*, most corrupted-by-greed ways of handling F2P in mainstream gaming. If you think anything else, you’re honestly not very bright. And the games ceiling is lower than low. Lower than any other ARTS game, or proper RTS for that matter. Dont kid yourself.

“LoL is accessible, fun and super challenging. It requires you to learn without hammering you over the head with a mountain of a learning curve. It allows the best players to show off their skill and make plays happen from nothing. And it’s free to play. And has been from the beginning. Disregard runes and paying for champions, only tell me if the core game could be made better if they didn’t have a free to play model.”

First off. You must be really bad at gaming to think LoL is super challenging and the game *would* be better if it wasnt free to play in this case, as you’d play whoever the fuck you wanted to, whenever the fuck you wanted to. And dont get me started on runes, they’re detrimental to the entire point of an ARTS, and forces you to buy riot points so you dont waste influence points on champions. Its a game corrupted by greed with a meta-game that is again, ruled by greed. Every single new champion is overpowered as shit for a few patches and then nerfed into the ground, its a great marketing strategy, but its also got to do with Guinsoo’s incompetence at balancing a game.
And dont get me started on Riots shady business-practices either.

I’d say if you were to point towards games that’re good despite being F2P (or in the case of one, better because of it) I’d point you towards Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. And Tribes: Ascend does it well too. But thus far, Dota 2 is definitely the champion as far as free-to-play games go.

This covers about 9 month’s worth of champions, with a close to even power ratio. The idea that Riot releases overpowered champions on purpose is completely unsupported by fact, it’s basically little more than a conspiracy theory. I disagree with some of your other points also (not to mention that several of them apply just as well to T:A, with the caveat that Tribes guns generally take less time to unlock than LoL champions do), but those are mostly opinion, and I’m guessing that it would take quite a bit to sway yours.

EDIT: Whoops, Zed is unpatched, actually. Had him as nerf because of a pre-release patch. So that’s an actually-even count, not bad for a round number sample.

Very interesting. I have backed PA because I want a new Supreme Commandery game and for long I have hoped for an rts with the minimal amount of micro gestion.
Who is the fastest clicker is not a game I am very interested in..

Sad that even the best get poisoned by the smell of money. Honestly, most of the great games come from people just making it for the love of making it (Minecraft off the top of my head, plus the origional HW just screams “we did this because we love it” over “for the money”). That is what made them what they are.

Yes, you can be economically successful with other means, and sadly the F2P will no doubt be “successful”. But just as with Hawken, I either won’t play it as F2P mechanics kills the enjoyment that was there, or I won’t play it because F2P mechanics means it never had anything to sell to me in the first place.

You’d want just anyone o pick up the license and make a game? You wouldn’t even know what the end result would be. It might be an always online, pay to play fps with microtransactions set in the homeworld universe. Just to name an example. *cough*

We really need some way to crowd-fund the bidding on the property. Something where the pledgers are only charged if the bid is accepted.

Can you refund pledges on Kickstarter? If so, it might make sense for Blackbird Interactive to post a Kickstarter asking for people to help them raise money to bid on the Homeworld IP, as long as they promise to refund everyone if the bidding falls short. I’d pledge to that.

I met the guy in person once. Very hard to read. Either not good at communicating his vision/thoughts or doesn’t care for communicating them at all. I suppose being a honcho means you get used to people doing their best to read your mind. Not surprised that this interview has not revealed much.

“What we want to avoid is that click-fest barrier to entry that a lot of RTS games are known for.”

\o/
Finally, an RTS I might actually be good at! I dearly love the genre since the days of Tiberian Dawn, through Seven Year War and Starcraft, to Homeworld, Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes, but by god am I bad at the micromanagement and arthritis-inducing clicking required to get anywhere.

In a world where there is only two sides to every story (read: RPS), that might be true. But luckily the world doesn’t work in simple dichotomies, so there’s a lot of space between the “clickfests” of typical RTS and the more serene nature of typical TBS.

Sure there is a middle ground, but the guy said he can play Shogun but cant play Dawn of War,
its obvious that he just prefers turn based, Shogun battles having the Pause + command cannot be really considered real time, plus the rest of the game is turn based

What I mean is, if you think like that, maybe stick on playing turn based strategy games rather than trying to convert Starcraft/Dawn of War games into an slow moving amoeba

On the other hand, regarding the click-fest, would Company of heroes be considered a click-fest or micromanaging based RTS?

I’m not sure it’s not so clear cut. The campaigns can be played at a relatively leisurely pace, but the multiplayer can be downright hectic. It’s also a great example of a game that encourages micromanagement by making the use of special abilities and positioning essential.

I suppose that sort of attention to detail actually makes CoH and Dawn of War quite similiar to turn-based strategy.

Well yes, forgive my initial comment because its definitely not accurated, there is not only black and white

The thing is it sounds weird wanting to slow down a game, like Starcraft, because you are just more comfortable with a game like TW:Shogun, it would seem that its just a matter of preference instead of thinking that being too fast or too micromanaging dependant is “wrong”

Specially when the problem is sometimes the lack of variery when it comes to strategy games, I would actually love to have more fast games, more micromanaging games, more hybrids (perhaps like total war games) and more pure turn-based games, just more of everything (please? :))

and then, if Dawn of War and Company of Heroes are not percibed as so much of a click-fest, guess the only real click-fest is Starcraft hardcore competitive multiplayer

RTS games did not originally require as much micro-management as they do today. In a sense, they were slower. That does not mean they were turn based games.

Playing Starcraft 2 on a high tier requires you to move units individually (forming lines to maximize damage, leading enemies on chases, moving units out of blasts, etc.). Personally, I don’t understand how a game can even be considered a “strategy” game if you’re telling individual units how to tie their shoes. I think games like Supreme Commander are just a little bit better at actual strategy (before unavoidably crumbling beneath the weight of micro-management).

I do enjoy click-fest games. They are fun, and they are doing their own thing, testing the player’s coordination as much as rapid, intelligent thinking. I just think sometimes these games are trying to move in two directions simultaneously: strategy and tactics (micro-management). Take Company of Heroes, for instance: you can do extra damage to tanks by hitting their back armor. You’d think this would lead to ambushes with anti-tank guns, and cool “a-ha, gotcha!” moments. But more often than not, the map becomes so big and you control so many units that you’re not even paying attention to nice little details like this one. Which is a shame.

So, what would be the solution? Less units? A smaller map? If you do this, the game is not “RTS” anymore, as far as a Starcraft 2 player is concerned. Remove the tactical component / micro-management altogether? Same thing.

Hey, any developer out there? How about doing a game where you can have a hierarchy of players on a team, going from guys controlling squads and doing the micro-management of a group of soldiers all the way up to a supreme commander? (see what I did there?)

Thats it Kamos,
Its sort of what I’ve had in my head all the time, when the dev from the article was talking about expanding the genere and doing new things and then he reduced that to simply slowing the game to get a more casual audience

Micromanaging is not what is stopping people from playing RTS games, its true that top tiers of Stacraft 1 and 2 might have pushed the importance of micro to the limit but I would say thats just a small part of it, the game is still strategy in the sense of : you have to plan what you are going to build, which units and when and scout the enemy to adapt to what he is building/producing etc

The idea you mentioned would be great, specially if done in a very big scale

I’m not sure how far Starcraft 2 APM goes (people I talk to say 250 but I’m not sure if they’re joking, never played it myself), but plenty of Company of Heroes experts/top players I’ve talked to run at around 60-80 APM, apart from a bunch of players who also play SC2.
Extended fights are another thing, though, especially if you have lots of units/fragile units like snipers, and even more so if you have 2-3 fights over the map. You need to make sure every unit gets to cover/flanks enemy in cover, use abilities, retreat on time, so it can get pretty nasty at times.

Well both DoW and CoH had way lower APM barriers than starcraft moslty because
a) you commanded squads rather than individual units
b) positioning played a different role (while starcraft does have some positional elements, they are not exactly same as use of cover/flanking/suppressing fire in Relic’s RTSes)
c)DoW and CoH had penalties to accuracy for firing on the move.

SC2 APMs go to 350+ these days, tho there were pro players having some success (as in getting past group stage in major tourneys) with APM in range of ~150. But SC also has bigger focus on producing mass of units and establish economy through bases. CoH and DoW were more about controlling territory to obtain resources and keeping units alive for as long as possible (because reinforcement cost was much lower than buying a full new squad, plus all the upgrades/rank ups).

Personally I prefer RTSes in vain of CoH and DoW, even DoW2 with it’s lack of base building and focus on tactical aspects over turtling in a base.

Micro can be more or less severe. I prefer games where I don’t have to explicitly order my troops when to move their right foot and when to put the left. And no, they do not have to be turn based for that.

I’m not very fast, but I enjoy Starcraft, Dawn of War, etc like they are now, wouldn’t want them less intense/micro/fast,
Competitive gaming is different, but then I dont think this games would be more strategic and less speed-based if there was less micromanaging,
They would need to be a different game all together, perhaps moving closer to another realm far from RTS, thats what I meant with my comment

It seems to me that most of the frantic clicking comes into play because we’re expected to manage individual units in combat – which is fun for some people, but is really less strategy and more tactical babysitting. My point is that micro is not something that’s key to the experience, but a gameplay element that started as a necessity due to bad AI, and has become an unconsidered addition in almost every RTS since C&C (or Dune, I guess). “If you’re not microing, you’re doing it wrong” has been accepted as a fundamental truth, when it was never more than a byproduct of a certain design pattern.

Said another way, there is nothing to stop you making an RTS in which issuing commands to individual units was impossible. Or an RTS where units engaged in combat would no longer respond to any command except “retreat”.

Not saying that’s the ideal or only way to do an RTS, but it’s certainly not wrong. Yet many designers seem to think the only way forward is adding more and more special abilities to units, and shrinking the battle size to put more emphasis on tactical unit control.

Exactly, everyone seems to think that the Starcraft is the only “proper” RTS. I guess this is another one of those situations where people forget what the term “RTS” actually means and associate it with a very narrow subset of games.

Just saying nothing is wrong with fast RTS games like Starcraft (except the over abuse of unit skills in SC2 and Dawn of War2, etc, I totally agree with that), they are strategic aswell in terms of planifying and adapting to the enemy strategies, its just done faster, the thing is when it comes to multiplayer everything has polarized and things gone to the extreme

My point is there should just be more of everything, more games like Starcraft/Dawn of War, more like Crusader Kings, and more like Total War series, so everybody is able to choose depending on their preferences

I was hyped about this but now I feel it’s been brought back down to earth with F2P mechanics. They are after all grounded in enticing the player to pay for something. This meets the relative problem of either an item not needed for gameplay, and so the developer losses out economically, or something required for gameplay, so the player gets jumped.

What we really need is to take hold of the system and bring it under control of the player. Then they can speed things up or slow down in the light of their own play style.

That second screenshot is so Homeworld it made my heart ache a little bit.

I don’t think there is enough to go on to really get excited or curse this game. Free to play is a bit of a turnoff, but who knows? This one has good parents and is a long way out. Might grow up to be good.

It is kind of nice to hear that they don’t want to have maximum micro in this. Homeworld had a good balance of micro vs macro, and I’d like some more of that. Starcraft makes my hands hurt after a while.

I’m so sick of f2p. I’ve been playing planetside 2 for a while now, spent a bunch of cash in it to speed it up, and I still haven’t got much cool stuff. Great.

What happened to awesome RTS where the best times to be had was in the campaign, and even better, the single-player skirmishes with a fun AI, where you’d perfectly craft your army and absolutely steamroll an enemy AI. I love multiplayer, but it’s also irritating and stressful at times. I don’t want games that hold me back from using the awesome units. I don’t want to pay ridiculous amounts for the privilege. Let me pay for your game, and enjoy it with what time I do have.

f2p games are great… but developers and publishers should be hesitant to use this model. Please devs, take my single payment as I throw it at my monitor. I might throw another one for some cool DLC (Or even an expansion).

And a day after Chris Taylor of all people finally getting it and looking at the collected player statistics of RTSes over the last more-than-a-decade and putting 2+2 together that SINGLEPLAYER is what people want, and play.

Rob Cunningham ignores decades of hard data and things F2P multiplayer is going to have an audience. Sorry Rob. People loved Homeworld because of it’s SINGLEPLAYER, not because of it’s multiplayer.

Why devs put an emphasis on the multiplayer aspect of an RTS is, I suspect, partly due to spending a ridiculous amount of hours in the office playing the multiplayer part of their games.

Read anything from the guys who made C&C red alert or even stuff from some of the old bulldog guys who made the og Syndicate.
All they talk about is the multiplayer aspect whereas we, as players, just remember sending four guys to a floating platform in the middle of the atlantic with gauss guns.

Corvettes were good for taking out fighters and other fast-movers. Corvettes have fast-tracking turrets instead of fixed mount weapons (like fighters do). So basically, frigates beat corvettes beat fighters beat frigates. You can get away with not having corvettes unless the enemy swarms you with fighters. I’d usually employ a few multi-gun corvettes for defensive duties if the enemy was making bombing runs.

It was nothing like this. More of a space sim with trading set on the moon Titan. I have a lot of fond memories of that game, shame I can’t get it working on Windows 7!

On topic, going to be interesting seeing how a free to play RTS evolves with an experienced developer at the helm, but I certainly have my doubts. I imagine pay to win would be particularly disastrous in this genre.

This totally solved a minor mystery for me – how in the world the artists who built the eatART robots paid for those crazy robot beasts.

I saw eatART’s robots out at the first Vancouver MiniMakerFaire a year and a half ago, they’re pretty fantastic. (Although I gotta admit the pedal-powered walking robot kind of edged out their diesel-powered robot on the environmentally-friendly aspect.)

I haven’t been hooked on any F2P’s lately other than my previous TF2 addiction, but if they’re building something story-focused with a good un-grindy single-player experience, that sounds good to me. (Online multiplayer strategy gameplay is just waaaaaaay too time-consuming to fit into actual life.)